The high cost of producing physical Bitcoin hardware limits its practicality for everyday transactions.
Too little corroboration in the last 3 days to call a trend (3 articles). Watching for it to gain traction.
Still mostly niche and specialist coverage — not yet picked up broadly by mainstream press.
"XOR, a simple data obfuscation technique, is used to scramble all the blockchain data while it is at rest on a hard drive. XOR was initially discussed in 2014 when anti-virus software started getting tripped up by blockchain data it interpreted as virus code."
"Bitcoin limits both the size of blocks and the number of signatures that can be used in transactions. These are the greatest costs to validating nodes, and the protocol limits on them have been in place since the very early days of Bitcoin, precisely to prevent abuse by any high-frequency or high-volume use of the ledger."
"The cost for Satochip hardware can be as low as 13 Euros, depending on the bulk purchases, which is cheaper than an Opendime, which gets us closer to everyday cash purchases, but not by that much."